A recent coffee tasting with Sunalini Menon, one of the world?s leading coffee proponents, is one of the most affable person to meet. She is, ironically, almost a contrasting relay of calm, compared to the caffeine-rich heartbeat-racing beans she works with. At a recent coffee tasting with her at a Coffee Day lounge, this is what I learned.
Coffee is as diverse as wine. It is as complex a beverage and one needs a similar level of dedication and discernment to part-decipher it. The bigger trouble with coffee is that the water makes a more immediate difference in the final brew and, if the drink has to be savoured in every sip, the temperature, too, must be kept under watchful eye.
In moderation coffee is beneficial to our health. For all it?s perky perks, it is also a rich source of antioxidants.
Caffeine is present in all forms of coffee. You want a goodnight coffee, make yourself one with milk. Else, opt for the French Press.
While Espresso is a great way to enjoy coffee, don?t disregard the Madras filter method. Hand-aerating the milk by pouring it from a height is a skill unto itself; it forms unique bubbles on the surface that hold the aromas, and, upon sipping, burst forth with a range of textures and flavours on the palate.
Indian coffee making is not just to be saluted. The Indian coffee bean is special too. The new packaging of the Mysore Royal by Coffee Day is a single estate blend, i.e. all the beans were sourced from one particular farmland. It is diverse in its taste, rich cocoa and some tawny orange zest hints.
Coffee Day is not just a coffee shop. This, the lady didn?t tell me; I inferred. They have some fantastic innovative options, like the ?drizzle?, which is something between a filter and a tea-bag form of having coffee, but very good coffee.
In Delhi, I paired the Royal Mysore with a cookie but the rich chocolate gateau, dripping with thick sauce was the one that truly went well with the coffee-with-milk version.
For Coffee Day and Menon, this is but a start. The Philippine civet coffee (extracted from the excrement of a civet) will soon find a match in the Indian mongoose coffee, and the monkey parchment coffee, both of which exist, and are being researched by Menon for viability. The reason why one would comb through the faecal matter of fauna is because these animals have an instinctive way of finding the best bean-producing plants to feed off. Over time, it helps to identify the better plants in the plantations, thereby allowing for selective reproduction to improve overall crop. And, since, the bean isn?t really broken down by their digestive tracts, we end up with some of the choicest coffee beans.
Coffee is here to stay but it is not a tea-killer. Tea bags will kill tea, awful flavourless things that they are. For the moment, coffee is more convenient to make simply at minimum loss of flavour of constituents.
The writer is a sommelier